"I believe very strongly in teaching people the best, long term way to do things and I always will. But that doesn't mean everyone wants to be taught the long term benefits, or quite frankly, that they will even 'get it'. The crusade to rid the world of everything that is bad for us, whether it's McD or search engine spam, is doomed to fail unless we plan to take away people's right to choose as well."

"I think we have all seen areas in the past that were loaded with what looked like hard coded sites sitting on top of the regular results, but this looks like its creeping into more and more areas. With all the outcry over the latest update, has Y! decided that the algorithm just isn't cutting it and they now have to hand tweak in order to have clean results?"

"I wonder whether there should be a design principle of not having more than say a dozen clearly visible choices on any screen. You'd look at the likely traffic to figure out what those choices should be. Then clicking on your choice would give you another screen with some subchoices."

"I know that string URLs are a bad idea from an SEO [search engine optimization” perspective but wondered if anyone could tell me why they are, and why people use them? In other words do certain types of websites have no choice but to use strings?"

"Over the past several months, Google have given a small number of advertisers the ability to run longer ad text on the Google Network. They have recently started inviting others to participate in phase two of this programme. They hope to begin the beta test in mid-August and may continue it into October."

"I know everybody talk about getting good positions, but what is interesting me now is how to get ugly ones. I did a great job for a client of mine, the first place for the requested keyword, but now he doesn't want to pay me for the job. What can I do now to undo the results?"

"Google forced an update to their toolbar that activated an autolink button feature by default. What this means is that this button, when activated, will allow Google to place links on your web page to Amazon, among other places."

"We are rewriting our websites to be in ASP.NET and our programmers are using iFrames instead of regular frames. I was a little leery about them so am trying to do research! If anyone else has any hints, tips, experiences... please chime in."

About the author

Chris Sherman is a frequent contributor to several information industry journals. He's written several books, including The McGraw-Hill CD ROM Handbook and The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can't See, co-authored with Gary Price. Chris has written about search and search engines since 1994, when he developed online searching tutorials for several clients. From 1998 to 2001, he was About.com's Web Search Guide.